Hi Alan,
Alan Bartlett wrote:
Overall not everyone can run i686 for whatever reason. The fact remains IMO that there is still a fair amount of need for an i586 image regardless of it it's for fall back issues or run natively I also believe that this isn't catered for by Centos 4 with support that run's out in ~4 years.But surely we should not forget the basic essential of the CentOS Project - it's equivalence to Upstream's EL. If Upstream support an i586 in their EL 5 then, yes, CentOS should.
I very strongly disagree with that statement. We do lots of things that upstream dont - and there is no reason why we cant expand on that. After all CentOS is not driven by a commercial end game ( as upstream is ), were doing things here that we want to, as a community.
Also, there was no i586 support in EL4, there is in CentOS-4. Iirc, EL3/CentOS3 have the same relationship.
Besides you just completely marginalised the work done for things like the LiveCD, ServerCD's, the entire Plus and Extra repos etc.
As the core distribution - sure, the plan is to stick as close to upstream as is possible, legal and acceptable. However, the centos community is just that - a community of people. If there are things that people want to take up, nothing stops them from doing that. The very last argument in the stack should be 'because upstream does not do this, so we wont either'.
Perhaps i586 support could be provided as an offshoot (which, given time, will become a dead-end). Support which Manuel, and like minded persons, could provide (under the watchful eye of one of the core developers) perhaps?
i586 support on CentOS5 was always meant to be an 'alternative' install mechanism.